In The Spotlight

Update of CFI June 18 Analysis of Convention Corporate and Other Donors

Donors to Party Conventions Have Spent Over $1 Billion
on Federal Lobbying Since 2005

Weeks before the conventions, less than a quarter of projected
contributions have been publicly disclosed

In the four weeks since CFI’s analysis of private donations to the upcoming national party conventions,
the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Denver “host committees” have acknowledged 39 new organizational donors.
Table 1
provides their names, headquarter locations, industrial sectors, and
federal lobbying expenditures since 2005. The full 146 organizational
donors to the conventions -- nearly all of them business corporations
(AARP and the SEIU labor union are significant exceptions) -- have
spent $1.1 billion to lobby the federal government on legislation and
regulations, an average of $7.7 million per company.

As of today, 70 companies or other organizations have given only to the
host committee for the Democratic convention, 39 only to the one for
the Republican conclave, and 37 others to both. The latter group of
“double-givers” includes 9 companies that decided to donate to a second
host committee following our earlier report: American Wind Energy
Association, Chesapeake Energy, Coca-Cola, Ecolab, Kraft, Pfizer,
Pitney Bowes, Wells Fargo, and Xerox.

In the previous report, CFI noted the inadequacy of
current legal requirements for post-convention disclosure of the
amounts of contributions to host committees and the decline of
voluntary host committee pre-convention disclosure. CFI therefore wrote
directly to all 146 companies requesting that they provide the amounts
of their contributions and indicate what proportions were cash and
in-kind. While some companies provided new information, the response
was generally disappointing.

Table 2
presents publicly known information about the amounts donated or
pledged thus far to host committees by organizations, representing cash
and in-kind contributions. Sources for these figures include press and
Internal Revenue Service Section 527 political organization reports,
CFI’s donor survey, and the Denver host committee’s contract with the
Democratic National Committee, which lists pledges. Thus far 31
organizational donors have provided some disclosure of their
contributions to the conventions. The remaining 115 donor companies not
included in Table 2
have refused to provide any such information. Only weeks before the
conventions, we are only able to identify and attribute an estimated
$26.1 million of the projected $112 million slated to be collected by
the convention host committees.